Your story is unrealistic as the teenager would quite easily be able to acquire CS2 for home use, either through the heavily discounted student version or, I suppose, simply by pirating it.
Anyway, GIMP is seriously limited when compared to the feature set of Photoshop. It makes no sense for him to kickstart a design career using inferior software, just because it happens to be open sourced.
When I was a kid I had exactly zero budget for software.
And I believe even the discounted version of Photoshop is on the order of hundred bucks.
Piracy is not a good opton in context of this discussion.
The feature set is an interesting question but an orthogonal to one we've been discussing, that is: preferring the current mainstream, business-adopted software even if it costs significantly more.
Yes I do agree with you that piracy is not a good option, and if the hypothetical student did indeed have zero budget and enough moral character to refuse to pirate the commercial software, then open source would be the ideal choice in this situation.
By using open source products in education in the first place, you can push students to install the same software at home and continue tinkering. Without regard to their material status or moral character.
I don't see why you demote this to merely an option. It's the cruical selling point. Open source programs also tend to be cross platform (available to more students) and support open data formats (their data will not be locked, flowing freely).
Anyway, GIMP is seriously limited when compared to the feature set of Photoshop. It makes no sense for him to kickstart a design career using inferior software, just because it happens to be open sourced.